Confessions Sin Quotes

We tend to think of babies as innocent, but according to Augustine, ignorance does not equal impunity. As Augustine points out later in the paragraph, the fact that it definitely would not be acceptable for an adult to throw a tantrum shows that tantrums must be sins for children, too. The bigger point here is that no human on earth can escape sin, which means that everyone, no matter how good, needs to seek out God's mercy.

This is a pretty good summation of sin in general—at least, sin of the non-violent variety—and it comes at the tail-end of the chapter on Augustine's childhood. This is right as he's entering into the world of adolescence, where much more serious sins are waiting for him. Rather than saying "I liked sex" or "I liked praise," Augustine instead tells us that his real problem was that he cared too much about himself instead of God… and that opened a whole can of issues for him. Kind of like Pandora's Box.

You know the trope of the Justified Criminal? You know, a character who does something bad but for a good purpose and you side with him? Augustine is not that character. His shenanigans are purely for kicks and giggles. When he sits down to try to analyze his behavior later in life, he can't even really come to any conclusion about why he did what he did. Except that, without God in their lives, people flounder around and do all sorts of inexplicable bad things.

Not all good things are created equal. Augustine likes to divide things into "high" and "low" orders, in order to show how something that might appear to be fine and dandy, like friendship, shouldn't surmount the more important "high" order good things, like God's law. See, the tricky part of sin is that sometimes it doesn't look like sin.

As we all know, behaving badly "just because" is a pretty common human tendency. What's interesting about this quote, though, is that Augustine uses prisoner/slave metaphors not once, but twice. Augustine is pointing to the idea of power, of being under the power of someone else, and of trying to exercise our own power against that someone by breaking their rules. But when we exercise power in that way, it's actually really pathetic, because it's only imitation-power. Which is almost as bad as imitation cheez.

Read that sentence again. At first you might have assumed that Augustine meant "I created for myself a barren waste," as in he was in a wasteland. But he actually says "created of myself a barren waste," as in he himself became a wasteland (not a wonderland). That's a strange metaphor, isn't it? It's not every day that you compare yourself to a chunk of earth. But by saying that he himself is barren, instead of someone in a barren landscape, he's making that landscape internal. You can always wander out of a barren wasteland, but how do you wander out of yourself? If you figure that out, let us know, because we get pretty sick of ourselves sometimes.

No, Augustine doesn't empathize with Oedipus, with the killing his father and marrying his mother and all. (Well, maybe on some Freudian level he does.) Augustine's ability to relate to the stage has more to do with things like pathos and catharsis. After all, who doesn't enjoy a sad movie? But this is madness, says Augustine, because the pity is fake. And no one should be using fake pity like a drug.

Being pious is easy when it's, well, easy, but when it involves actually sacrificing the things we enjoy, then it's pretty hard. We might, rather conveniently, choose not to think about how what we do is at odds with what we claim to believe. Hey, if piety were so simple then everyone'd be doing it.

Well, they say admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery. But what does Augustine mean when he says that his impiety had divided him against himself? Are there two Augustines duking it out? No. He means that by not taking the blame for his actions, Augustine is externalizing his willpower. Remember, the Manichees believe that all particles, including the particles we're made of, are either good or evil. So he thinks believing in all that material nonsense is like eating your friend's birthday cake and saying "My stomach made me do it. Sorry."

It sounds like Augustine just repeated this quote from Psalms 4:4 verbatim, but actually, he is reading it in a very specific way and applying it to himself. Here's what we mean: the King James translation of the line reads, "Stand in awe, and sin not." So, taken on its own, the line seems to be talking about standing in awe before God and being too afraid to sin again. But Augustine is actually trembling before his past, not God, and his fear of his own past actions is what compels him to not sin again.